Every so often I get a hankering for a really small laptop and end up buying a total piece of junk. This time I found Ultrabook Review's guide to the best small laptops and will make no mistake. Here's what I'm getting: Chuwi's $320-ish Minibook X, an inexpensive yet contemporary option.
The MiniBook X from Chuwi is a metal 2-in-1 design that weighs about 2.1 lbs (.95 kg) and offers a 10.5-inch 16:10 IPS touchscreen, a full-size backlit keyboard, and competitive hardware specs. This is built on an Intel Jasper Lake N5100 Celeron processor with 12 GB of RAM and 512 GB of SSD storage. There's only a small battery inside, though, at 26Wh, so don't expect long runtimes. …I'd like to give this a proper review – this seems very interesting; I just hope they didn't try too hard to make it that lightweight and unnecessarily sacrificed battery life in the process.
A slightly-deflating yet unavoidable fact is that the final models of Apple's 12-inch Macbooks, though now old as heck, remain the best pick at the next-up $400-$500 tier, though the condition of their batteries at this point is inevitably in question. Newer alternatives such as the Thinkbook Nano just quite aren't as compact or inexpensive, and will be in rough shape (i.e. cycling out of rough institutional use) if you can find one that cheap. The deluxe option appears to be the One Mix 4 (see Lisa Gade's positive review) for those willing to fork out.
